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Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Artist impression of the TRAPPIST-1b and -1c transit.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI) with
science credit to NASA, ESA, and J. de Wit (MIT)

On May the 4th the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) trained its mirror on a little ultra-cool dwarf star, just 39-light years away, called TRAPPIST-1. What it saw was a rare, and before unseen event, two Earth-sized exoplanets passing in front of the star just minutes apart. These two planets, TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c, were discovered by a Belgian robotic telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. The TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) telescope has only just begun it's search of the 1,000 nearest dwarf stars and came up with a winner.

There are a lot of papers and press articles you can read on this which I will link at the bottom, but here I wanted to tell my story of involvement and why I think this is a great step forward in exoplanet science.

One thing to note is that TRAPPIST-1, the star, is just 2,500K that is cooler than some exoplanets that have been discovered. This means that even though it's planets b and c are very close with orbits of just 1.5 and 2.4 days respectively, they are still relatively temperate with estimated temperatures of around 250 degrees - similar to the inner planet of our solar system. The first thing that needs to be worked out to take our understanding of the implications further is what is the atmosphere made up of? This is a key step towards understanding these worlds and the nature of their environments.

"What I love most about these observations is the presence of both planets distinctly transiting the star just minutes apart. "

On May the 4th a team led by Julien de Wit from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used Hubble to observe the system to get an idea of this. A week earlier I was called while in the UK by Nikole Lewis, who was leading the team from Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), who asked if I would be interested in analyzing some new data she was involved with from Hubble for small earth sized planets. I was not told much more about what I would be analyzing or the nature of the observations but loving HST analysis and trusting Nikole I agreed. The day I flew back to The States, I remember landing and reading my Twitter feed to see that there had been a Nature paper on the discovery of three Earth-sized planets around a dwarf star. I then immediately emailed Nikole to ask if these were the planets we would be analyzing with Hubble. A day before the observations were to be taken I was called and told I should come up to STScI, just and hour north of Washington DC in Baltimore, to work on the data with the team as they would be getting access to it early in the morning. So I headed up for the start of what turned out to be an intense week or so of back a forth analysis and paper writing. As the only outsider to the TRAPPIST team, called in specifically to apply my expertise on analyzing Hubble exoplanet data I spent some time playing catch up, but quickly realized what a fantastic opportunity this was and how special these planets may be. So I want to say a massive thank you to the TRAPPIST team and Nikole for inviting me in, and for being so welcoming since.

What I love most about these observations is the presence of both planets distinctly transiting the star just minutes apart. You can see that in the light curve in our paper. First TRAPPIST-1c (red), the outer planet, starts to transit, then just 12 minutes later TRAPPIST-1b (green) starts to transit. Due to the size/speed of their orbits they both then pass out of the disk of the star relative to us, the observer, at the same time. The blue model shows the effect of the combined light blocked out by both of the planets during the course of the observations.

Fig 1 of the Nature paper - I have modified it by removing the top panel for the purpose of this blog post.
See the paper for the full figure and caption.

For these observations we used Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on Hubble to observe this event in the near-infrared, just beyond the red part of what our eyes can detect. At these wavelengths you can detect the absorption from different things in the atmosphere by seeing how the amount of light blocked by the planets changes with small changes in the wavelength/color. This method is called transmission spectroscopy and has been used to look at the atmospheres of many exoplanets (see my previous blog post on #HJSurvey).

"I see great things for the future of exoplanet studies by looking at the TRAPPIST-1 system, and I look forward to seeing or even working on more results from the team."

The observations we took of both TRAPPIST-1b and -1c showed us that these small Earth-sized worlds do not have large envelopes of hydrogen and helium. This is great! The lack of a puffy atmosphere like that of the gas giants in our solar system further hints at the rocky, terrestrial nature of these worlds. What you can see here is the measurements we made across the different wavelengths (black points), compared to different model atmospheres. Due to the combined signal of the two planets we were able to get very precise measurements, considering they are such small worlds around a small star. This is the first step towards future measurements of both planets as they transit the star apart over the next few years to rule out and confirm different atmospheric compositions.

Fig 3 of the Nature paper - This shows the transmission spectra of TRAPPIST-1b and TRAPPIST-1c compared to different atmospheric models. The top is the combined transit measurements, the bottom shows the measurements made by deconstructing the light curve into the two planet components.

With more Hubble observations we could potentially detect water in the atmosphere and get an idea of the depth of the atmosphere, or we could even get an idea if the planet has methane in its atmosphere. These types of preliminary observations are vital in the lead up to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2018, which will be the next great observatory in space. JWST will get us even more information across more wavelengths where perhaps even biosignatures like CO and Ozone can be detected. We will also attempt to get more precise information on the planets temperatures and even possible the surface pressure.

Another important aspect of these observations is the star itself. We actually know very little about M-stars. The classification of TRAPPIST-1 is M8 which means it is a very small very cold star. In fact it is so cold (in relative terms) it has a significant amount of water vapor that can exist in the stars atmosphere. One of the things we had to do for these observations was enlist the expertise of Jeff Valenti at STScI to help understand how the light from the star itself will change at different wavelengths so that it could be accounted for in each of our wavelength bins. There is still so little we know about the impact an M-star will have on the atmospheres or even habitability of their planets that this is another reason why looking at these systems is so fascinating. We need to study more M-star systems to get a better idea of their stars and understand how they change the planets that form and evolve.

Small planets around small stars - where the relative amount of light being blocked out in transit then becomes large - are key steps towards our understanding of habitability, formation, and atmospheric dynamics. I see great things for the future of exoplanet studies by looking at the TRAPPIST-1 system and I look forward to seeing or even working on more results from the team.

Sunday, January 31, 2016

This is what I was doing in 1995.Conducting, Counting, and at the beach. These weirdly follow myreal life. But those trousers in the middle, what were they thinking.

It is strange, when I think about the discovery of exoplanets, I cannot place the first time when it dawned on me they were real and not just science fiction. When I give talks about exoplanets to young audiences I am always quick to point out that they are the first generations to grow up always knowing that other worlds outside of our solar system exist. But, I fear I have been lying to myself this whole time, and I am actually part of that generation too.

In 1995 when exoplanets hit the big time, with the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, I was 5/6 years old. I was in year 1/2 at school (kindergarten/1st grade). My memories of that time are limited. I was modeling for children book publisher DK, where my aunt and uncle worked, and dreaming of becoming a farmer with my friends at school where we would have a farm to look after sick animals. The only science fiction we had been introduced to at this time by my mother was Quantum Leap, and Stargate was not due to be made into a TV show for another two years.

All I recall from the years following 1995 is my interest changed from farm animals to dinosaurs, spurred on by the 1993 release of Jurassic Park, and Jurassic park lost world in 1997. As this was all accompanied by trips to the Natural History Museum in London with the school, and clear memories of my friend being terrified of the animatronic T-Rex ripping apart another dinosaur as I walked past grinning and loving it.

We were not introduced to Star Trek or Star Wars growing up, because our mother did not watch it so we didn’t.The first experience of epic science fiction journeys to other worlds came in the form of Stargate SG1. When Stargate, a pivotal information source of my future ambitions and endeavors, did reach my consciousness we were already adventurers and explorers. My parents enrolled us in a snorkeling club where we went on big trips to the lake or the coast to explore the world under the waves. My father a amateur historian loved to take us to castles, towns, and museums. By the early 2000’s we were all planning to be Egyptian archeologists or marine biologists.

It was not until 2001/2 that I distinctly remember turning towards space*. My Father used to drive me to the Guildford astronomical society evenings, to listen to talks or look through a real telescope. Every single year our family grabs some bin liners and goes out to the field out the back of the house to lie down and look up at the sky during the Perseid meteor shower, but I don’t remember when that started, it is just something we have always done but quite honestly could be a relatively new tradition.

*In 2002 the first atmospheric detection was made of a transiting exoplanet (Charbonneau et al. 2002), work which forms the basis for what I do now as a postdoc.

Samantha Carter (Amanda Tapping) from Stargate SG1. We had this photo signed on our bedroom wall for at least 7 years. Then I took it with me to put on my wall at Uni.

Since I decided I wanted to be a real life Samantha Carter (Stargate Astrophysicist, adventurer, and all round depended on kick ass woman), I have not turned back. But by then the presence of other alien worlds as the norm was in my head, the new Star Wars prequels were out, we were having lightsaber fights in the science classroom with the meter rulers, and I was going to sic-fi conventions to meet people from Stargate, Lord of the rings, the matrix, and a host of other shows featured in SFX each month.

When I went to university exoplanets were not yet part of the general curriculum for undergrad classes. I selected my university degree based on how much space I could learn about, and by how far away they could send me for a year. I ended up at the University of Wales: Aberystwyth, the most awkward to get to from my parents home, where they sent me to Svalbard in the Arctic to finish up my MPhys year. It is half way through my time at Aberystwyth that I remember openly talking about exoplanets as a real scientific discovery. We were asked to write an essay about water on Mars or other planets. As we were enrolled in a Planetary and Space Physics degree, most of us had worked on Venus or Martian data, so I remember most of the class writing about that. But, I wrote an essay on exoplanets and the plans for the upcoming Kepler mission to find all of these strange new alien worlds, of course I linked it all back to Stargate in some way. I loved the work I did on the solar system planets, and the impact the Sun’s atmosphere had on our inner solar system, but I knew I wanted to work on exoplanets. I wanted to find an Abydos, or Chulak. I wanted to discover what they were like, was it anything we had seen before. Did Stargate get any of it right?

In 2010 myself and a friend convinced our advisor to apply to the Royal Astronomical Society for a summer internship position at the university to search through the first sets of data coming from the Kepler Exoplanet Mission. To link it to our work on the Sun, where we had previously been looking at CME tracking and sunspot evolutions, my friend used the Kepler data as a search for starspots to model their influence on the light curve, while I set about looking for planets transiting them.

I had my taste of what being an exoplanet explorer could be and I wanted to keep doing it as long as I could get away with it. But looking back there was no eureka moment. No point in time where I sat there and thought, ‘holy shit they are real and people have just discovered them’. They were always just there, be it in science fiction which I did not know was not based on truth yet, or in reality. As my earliest memories of the world stem from a time when they actually did exist despite the fact I was born in a world where they did not, I cannot truly claim to be part of the last generation to grow up with this world changing discovery.

But I think I am okay with that. Now I am part of the first generation to grow up always knowing we were not a lone solar system drifting at the reaches of our galaxy. Like Pluto I have been reborn.

Me talking about exoplanets, and comparing hot Jupiters to a watermelon.